Suggestions for coming up to speed?

[spinsterweaver]

I am a Tech Writer who hasn't touched a HAT in 5 years, and the last one I touched was RH. I went from writing Help for an in-house-written software to P&P for a small department of a large corporation. Needless to say, my skills are rusty.

Current job is to update the User Guide for another software company. The original is written in FrameMaker which I have never used. I lobbied for and got Flare, but I've never used it either. I need to simply convert the book from one format to the other so that I can generate the pdf version of the user guide. I will have to wait to restructure the information for online help later. I am scheduled for training in a little more than a week.

So, can anybody recommend a way to approach Flare with the intent of *only* generating a print document?

cheers,

janet

[LTinker68]

Check out some of the guides accessible from the Help menu in Flare. I can't remember if there's one related to importing from FrameMaker, but there's definitely a Print Guide for generating print output.

[spinsterweaver]

I'll check those out. I'm still open to other suggestions if anybody has them. Thanks!

janet

[LTinker68]

If you're not familiar with HTML and/or CSS, you might also want to check out http://www.w3schools.com -- they have some great introductory content on those topics (don't bother with HTML 5 at this point, as I don't think Flare supports it). Although you can do most of what you need through the Flare GUI, there are times where you either have to dip into the back-end code or just having the knowledge will help to troubleshoot a problem with a topic.

[RamonS]

If you ever only want to do print then Blaze would have been the better choice. Anything Blaze can do Flare can do as well, but Blaze is less complex. There are also some good books out that cover Flare. Take a look at the announcements in Flare General, a few books are introduced there. And to prevent people of considering this a shameless plug, the book I translated is for online help and not so much for print although it covers basics that would apply for both.

[LTinker68]

MadCap doesn't make Blaze anymore. At least, it's not listed on their website, and its forum category was moved way down to the bottom of the list.

[RamonS]

Okeeee....I guess I need to brush up on my product knowledge a bit here. Thanks for the correction.